When Bowsing at The Beachcomber Becomes Way of Life : South Mission Beach Is IT for Many Old-Timers

You’ll find them bowsing around the bar at The Beachcomber in South Mission Beach--talking about nothing, curling a calloused palm around a cold beer or a Bacardi and Coke, passing a rainy afternoon playing floor darts with toilet plungers.

Or they’ll be across Mission Boulevard on The Bench--to a Beach Person, what Mecca is to a Muslim. They’ll be plotting a trip to Cabo, getting on a guy’s case, or cracking up about the time they mooned the lady with the camera in the passing car.

You can recognize them by the uniform: running shoes, cutoffs, hat and T-shirt from the bar next door--maybe not the threads selected by your average middle-aged man. Up close, there’s an unusual look in their eyes: bemused, wise, often a little glazed.

For some people, the beach is a lifetime, not something they slough off in their 20s in favor of a kidney-shaped pool. It’s their roots and their heritage--geographically or spiritually. They stay on, through their 40s and 50s and into retirement.

From outside, maybe the life looks soft. But it can burn a hole in a man’s work habits, his marriage or his physical health. Maybe it looks like a life without rules. But those who live it say there is a code of ethics, and sanctions if the code is breached.

Implicit in beach life is a rejection of certain mainstream ambitions--say, for a big house, a lawn, and certain fashionable habits. Other values take precedence--lifelong friends, sports, a good jag. A nice afternoon, said one beach regular, is a “nice plate of tacos, salsa, cold beer.”

“The whole complexion of San Diego is changing,” says Jay Cochrane, 37, whose blood still rises with the surf. “Things have got going too fast . This is solid, and these people aren’t dummies either. There’s no fools down here. There’s people that know too much.”

Many make their homes, or homes-away-from home, in South Mission Beach, a half-mile sliver of peninsula bounded by the old roller coaster and the jetty. Beach historians trace its genesis as Beach People’s Mecca to serendipitous blessings of public policy and nature.

In the old days, the Belmont Park area was the natural gathering place, says Mike Curren, a Mission Beach resident since 1937. Beside the still-standing lifeguard station, there was a bathhouse, and the zone line where the fares on the downtown trolleys and buses changed.

From that, Curren says, “a lifetime relationship evolved.” Kids from high schools and colleges all over the city met at that stretch of beach. When the city tore down the bathhouse, there was a year of limbo. Then somehow, everyone shifted to South Mission Beach, which starts at Ventura Boulevard.

The place has a mystique of its own, in part thanks to limited access. There’s bay on one side, ocean on the other, and an especially wide beach. You can even drink on the street here, residents say: To stop it, they’d have to ban drinking in all of Mission Bay Park.

“It’s a neighborhood,” said John, 44, a Bench regular who’s secretive about his last name. “I’m not an ethnic person, but if you’re raised in a Jewish neighborhood or an Italian neighborhood or Irish, that’s what this is. It’s like what maybe you’d find in New York.”

“It’s The Last Neighborhood,” growled a man at the end of the bar at The Beachcomber. “If I was ever to write a book, that’s what I would call it.”

Many Beach People balance beach life and a full-time job: Curren is a land surveyor; there are firefighters and teachers. Others work regularly but not 9-to-5--tending bar, clerking in the liquor store, doing carpentry and construction.

Some are retired, others say they’re retired, one says he sells drugs. They have traveled abroad--maybe on the pro surfing circuit or on vacation. Curren’s contemplating a trip with a friend down the Amazon. He returned recently from a vacation on the Trans-Siberian Express.

“Most people don’t grow up the way beach people live and act,” said Curren. “ . . . The biggest thing in their lives is owning a big house somewhere. But how often are you in a house? It’s like owning a swimming pool: To make it worthwhile, you have to be in it all the time.”

Royal Clarke, a.k.a. Weasel, started playing volleyball at Hoover High back in 1953. That led to beach volleyball, so he moved to Mission Beach in 1954 to be able to play. Not just volleyball, he explained, but over-the-line, too.

He got into mixed doubles volleyball, met his future wife, married, and moved to East San Diego. “Because the beach life is not a place to be married,” he said simply. They came back for volleyball every weekend. When they divorced, he moved back.

Now his volleyball career is over: He racked up a knee in 1972 and broke an ankle when he came down on a ball. So he plays some golf and dabbles in the T-shirt and trophy business. He does the early shift behind the bar at The Beachcomber, coming in at 7 a.m.

These days, Weasel shares an apartment across the street--”$425 a month, plus utilities, for a place no bigger than the bar.” A while back, he shared a three-bedroom house on the bay. Over four years, 44 people moved in and out.

Asked about the origins of his name, Weasel broke into a hoarse, infectious laugh. Then he launched into a story about a phone call one day from a coach in Poway that revealed nothing about the origins of his name--a tale in the great unrecorded oral tradition of life on the beach.

“He said, ‘Is The Weasel there?’ The bartender says no. ‘Well, what about The Fox? Is he there?’ No. ‘How ‘bout Little Moose?’ Nah, he’s not here either. ‘What about Fly, doesn’t he work today?’ The girl says, ‘None of them are here today. I dunno. They’re probably playing golf.’ So he hangs up. And he told me a couple days later that the two coaches in his office wanted to know if he called the San Diego Zoo.”

More hoarse infectious laughter.

Nicknames are big in this circle: Electric Charlie, Joe Bag O’ Doughnuts, Yosemite Sam. Curren remembers a lifelong friend who became an Air Force general. “We call him Snot because he has big nostrils,” he chuckled. “Now he’s General Snot.”

There are loosely knit fraternal orders like the Old Mission Beach Athletic Club (OMBAC), formed by Curren and others in 1953 and now a San Diego institution. Less established is the Royal Order of the Holy Plunger: Members drink from toilet plungers on the Fourth of July.

“There is a camaraderie down here--until you do something wrong to prove you’re unworthy of the friendship,” said John. “And boy, I’ll tell you right then it gets real hard. There’s a saying down here: ‘There’s no slack.’ You can’t buy it at the stores or bars or anywhere.”

Stealing is the worst. John gives his pals the run of his house. But if somebody should take something, that’s it. “There’s nothing to talk about any more,” he said.

Somehow, as if by an invisible hand, things get done. Someone clears up the beer cans and hoses down the sidewalk around The Bench. The same thing with the hippies who lived in the bushes and shared the community during the 1960s, John remembers.

“As soon as the sprinklers went on, everybody got up. Chook, chook, chook. I had a Chevron station,” John said. “I’d open up at 6 in the morning and there’d be a line of kids from here to The Pennant and back, girls and boys waiting to use the rest rooms. We had a deal; it was an unspoken deal. I left cleaning materials outside the rest rooms and everybody on the beach could use them. I never ever once had to clean the rest rooms.

“Standard Oil at that time was proud of their service stations and they would inspect your rest rooms. I was always getting awards for having the cleanest rest rooms!”

Jay Cochrane grew up in the surf in Solana Beach. Nearing 38, he lives in Point Loma but relies on beach life to find his bearings. The beach is a retreat from which to absorb succeeding waves of culture shock--painted by Cochrane in images of war and surfing.

“When I was into surfing, it was, you know, Dick Dale and the Del-Tones,” Cochrane said. “The Beach Boys only had two albums out--that kind of era. So I went to Vietnam and when I came back they had all short boards and goon cords and the whole thing. Surfing took on a very fast attitude. Instead of long boards--I had a 9’3--when I came back they were 6 feet, 7 feet. Kids were dropping in real radical and everything. It was like, ‘Whoa!’ ”

The latest shock for Cochrane is the new San Diego--symbolized by Mission Valley, singles bars, and the comments of women on radio call-in shows about sexual problems. He finds “the collective personality of San Diego pretty jaded. Too much too fast. Low boredom threshold.”

“It’s all new to us,” he said. “Whereas this--we can keep this the way we want it.”

So Cochrane works with two others doing voice-overs for radio commercials, making enough money to support himself and remain “beach mobile.” He travels around the world for triathlons but always returns to the beach. To quit, he “would have to be schizophrenic.”

“Because I’m too oriented to this. I’m too oriented to sunsets. I’m too oriented to checking out swells. I’m too oriented to having a Corona or two in the afternoon. I’m just habitual about it. And those are good habits.”

For some Beach People, the beach is just a part of their life--the place they leave in order to work or the place they return to in order to play. For others, it’s their entire life, and those inside it are well aware of the costs.

Partying, drinking and drugs take a toll, they say. Come down when there’s a jag going and you may end up missing two or three days’ work. Electric Charlie recently cut back his hours tending bar, after “New York George spit on me.”

John, who quit drinking 10 years ago “because I liked myself better than I liked alcohol,” says his only complaint with the neighborhood is “there’s too much emphasis on partying for the liquor.”

“There’s people here that are really talented people that are just wasted,” he said. “I’ve seen some good friends of mine, they were good athletes, they’ve pretty well eaten themselves up pretty young.”

Chuck Elias added quietly, “Not to mention those that are no longer among the living.”

Elias, 38, who moved to Mission Beach 20 years ago, lives with his long-haired dachshund and makes a living driving trucks, concedes “some pangs of resentment” toward newcomers who “probably don’t care as much about the neighborhood as they should.”

He sees it in the way they speed down the boulevard, ignoring the stop sign at The Bench and San Gabriel Place. He sees it in the way they mishandle their trash and animals, how they rip down towel dispensers and break porcelain fixtures.

Others see change in the rising rents, the proliferating condominiums. The mailman, an OMBAC member, sees a new sprinkling of small children. There’s a deck on the roof of The Pennant now. The two bars have come a long way from their bait shop days.

Yet Beach People subscribe to a South Mission maxim: If you went away for 20 years and came back, you’d recognize the guy tending bar at The Pennant. Which brings us round to the old days, when Chuck Elias tended bar:

“For the shift change in the afternoon--the shift changes at 6 o’clock--I’d get the fruit cut and get the bar just looking tough. So my relief would come on and all’s they’d have to do is head in for the cocktail hour.

“Well, another member of the cast of characters walks in pretty screwed up. The first thing he does is grab the CO2 bottle from behind the bar and opens up with it. Well, I must have had a dozen piles of napkins, at least that deep, set out around various areas of the bar. Every one was airborne at one time.

“There was a pool game going on at one of the pool tables. Every pool ball, I mean there was such a jet stream coming out of this bottle, I mean everything was airborne. The Christmas tree and the ornaments. The ornaments wound up in a rack on the pool table being broken with a regulation ball.

“They tore the Christmas tree down in protest, ripped it apart. (The owner) was beside himself. The next year, we wound up with an aluminum foil Christmas tree. Everybody was bummed out about that.”